In an article from The New York Times, Geoffrey Morrison explains how social media can be used positively, offering ways to best navigate Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Morrison writes:
…I post a lot of stories on my Instagram about where I am and what I’m doing. It’s public, but it’s also for my friends. I rarely…post about negative experiences. When I’ve done this in the past, I’ve gotten comments along the lines of “you’re traveling, everything is perfect, stop complaining.” That’s unfair, and untrue, yet when what you choose to present to the world seems perfect, people think everything is perfect…Here’s the thing: You don’t have to post anything you don’t want to. You don’t have to post at all. There is a pressure to share, of course, but what you share and how much is entirely up to you.
Read “How to Turn Depressing Social Media Into a Positive Influence” from The New York Times here
Sometimes the littlest things I said or did—all having to do with caring for myself—set the narcissist off.
Whenever it had to do with me focusing on myself, the narcissist got a little colder, a little more hostile. I understand, today, that this was the narcissist’s reaction to a perceived abandonment—by me.
Part of my self-care is recognizing how I was manipulated by the narcissist to not take care of myself.
Adapted from Surviving the Narcissist: 30 Days of Recovery
A study from Virginia Commonwealth University explains how different situations impact mindfulness. Ravi S. Kudesia, Ph.D., assistant professor at the Temple University Fox School of Business says:
“Mindfulness is often assumed to be something that people bring with them into situations, some stable psychological property that is inherent…If we instead see mindfulness as arising from the coming together of people and their situations, we can better conceptualize mindfulness and design organizational situations that enhance it.”
Read the outcome of the study here
Similar to their young child, the narcissistic parent references their own self in conjunction with someone else. The difference between a narcissist and a developing child, however, is that the child will eventually master this stage of self-identity. People are resilient, and even with a parent who is a narcissist, they will grow and develop and learn to disengage from their narcissistic parent’s patterns.
Adapted from When Your Parent Is a Narcissist
Obsessing is related to my trying to control something that is out of my control. It is how I unconsciously avoid addressing something. I can take this as a sign that I’m avoiding looking at the real problem.
Obsessions are distractions that keep me from feeling the sadness or the anger that’s inside me. While some of these emotions are related to the relationship with the narcissist, they are also connected to buried feelings from the past that, once addressed, can be healed and let go.
Adapted from Surviving the Narcissist: 30 Days of Recovery
In a blog post from Harvard Health, Faculty Editor Claire McCarthy, MD offers an interesting look at how shaming children can impact their lives. She explains the differences between criticizing and shaming:
“Criticizing a child in public may be important, especially if they have been rude or hurtful to someone, or done something that could be unsafe. But outside of those circumstances, public criticism is shaming. It also may not be a great idea to criticize when a child is already upset, or when they are in a situation where they need to keep their composure or not be distracted; that’s less about shaming and more about being kind and effective.”
Read the blog post here
You may feel like you’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand how your narcissistic parent feels. You may have learned to tilt your world to track them as though they are the satellite and you need their signal to survive.
When you feed their ideal self to their satisfaction, you might be rewarded with a compliment or a gift. Or the slightest feeling that maybe, just maybe, you two were starting to connect.
Then again, even if you did everything to your n parent’s satisfaction, maybe you weren’t rewarded. Turns out, you were reading the wrong signal the entire time. And sadly, you were probably the one who felt a bit foolish.
This is what it feels like to have a narcissist parent.
Adapted from When Your Parent Is a Narcissist
Nicole Spector explains what self-awareness entails and how we can better cultivate it. Spector quotes psychologist and author John Duffy who says:
“In effect, self-awareness is the recognition of one’s own emotional state at any given point in time…we are, far too often, wholly unaware of the emotional state we are currently in, and the degree to which that state influences our behavior and thought process. To the degree that we can manage our emotional states, we are better able to manage these other elements of our lives as well.”
Read the article from NBC News here
“Manipulations come in a variety of packages; we often know in our hearts when we’re being played but might not pay attention to the voice within telling us to steer clear. While there are many authentically, genuinely nice people, the narcissist is the one who seems too good to be true.”
Adapted from Narcissism: Surviving the Self-Involved
“With the narcissist parent, a real attachment to their child remains in question. This helps explain why the notion of a child’s launch and independence is so threatening. Launching, or letting go, evokes the narcissist’s deepest fears: abandonment, annihilation, and non-existence. Without the Other—the child—the narcissist may cease to exist.”
Adapted from When Your Parent Is a Narcissist
